Heather Freeman - Games

Our conversation with Heather was interesting for the fact that it discussed technology in a way that I am not used to using it. Of course the pairing of gaming and an interest in computers is nothing new, coming from a architectural research standpoint, the idea of telling a story through technology is completely foreign. Without resorting to pictorial representation, how can we use technology, in an architectural setting to tell a story. I don’t think its a question that we can, or even should attempt to answer at this time.

Instead, our discussion focused primarily on the way in which games can tell stories. For the past decade or so, games have been driven by functional ideas. More pixels, bigger crashes, and figuring out how to design a controller. In any developing technology, pushing its technical capabilities is important to continued success, but it does little to redefine what a video game is. Now that these technical aspects are increasing in their developing cost, we are starting to see the arrival of smaller games, that, instead of focusing on technical development, pride themselves in the story they tell. In many of the games, this affects mechanics of the game, leading to varied navigation, and control techniques. It is in these instances, where the story telling method is tied directly to the way that you play the game, that the game is most successful.

Primitive Parametric

After attending a the opening and the roundtable discussion about the Primitive Parametric Exhibit, it seemed that most, if not all of the discussion revolved around the use of the word “primitive”. While a semantic discussion can be interesting, and allowed each field to contribute to the discussion, I think it avoided talking about the work that was produced. While semantic disputes are inevitable, there should be a point at which contradictory definitions can be accepted within the context of the discussion. If the exhibit were trying to make a radical point about biology, philosophy or anthropology, a debate about semantics would have been warranted but when the context of the discussion is architectural there has to be a line in the sand that forces the conversation forward.

That being said, I do not think that the exhibit was about a singular primitive parametric. Rather, it was about our primitive understanding of the parametric. A point of debate I remember was that the timeline in the back of the exhibit should have been a branching timeline that explored the historiography of the primitive, and that at no point was their a singular definition of a primitive parametric. By focusing the topic on the understanding of the parametric metaphor, a linear timeline makes sense. At every point in time, there was, from an architectural perspective, a singular, or limited definition of biological metaphors. Each piece of work that was created responded to the cultural understanding of biology at the time, and by charting the evolution of understanding the branching historiography can be reduced to a linear timeline. The timeline is not about biology, but the development of understanding, one that grew increasingly sophisticated over time. Looking back from the contemporary understanding of biologic complexity, it was inevitable that our understanding and our interpretation of the biologic metaphor would become more nuanced and responsive to a biologists understanding of the actual thing. Ultimately to keep the conversation moving forward, I think the exhibit needs to own up to a set of presumptions that end certain unproductive debates.

Design Build: John Nelson, Greg Snyder

Ideas Seminar: John Nelson, Greg Snyder

 

Professors John Nelson and Greg Snyder, each who have extensive experience leading design-build activities, talked about matters that facing design/build education today. Design/build is a prevailing component of the education of an architect.  But a recent survey of these programs suggests there are fundamental problems for the long-term sustainability of design/build.  While student interest is strong, most design/build programs are not well integrated in the curriculum, necessitate specialty pedagogy and skills, are prohibitively expensive and time-intensive, require costly labs and the faculty workload of running design/build programs are higher than other forms of teaching and research programs.  

I believe that as technology advances at high speed, digital design and fabrication methods become more affordable and available in architecture. But I also think, John and Greg’s approach also important. From architectural design process, regardless of how big the project is, students are possible to learn about real-world architecture, which means tight budgets and construction restraints introduce students to the rigors of design. I mean, design-build studio offer good experience of architectural education, in terms of skill building, understanding of building processes, and providing a fundamental underpinning for design.

Zachary Tate Porter

Ideas Seminar: Zachary Tate Porter

 

The architectural design is a complicated process, and there are many ways in the process for designers and design students to develop their projects. Since we are concentrated on the digital technologies and parametric architecture, Zac Poter’s approach of the way to develop ideas of architectural design process is quite different and intriguing to me. Zachary Tate Porter showed us about his works and exhibition “Groundwork: Tracings, Excavations and Burials”. His works seem like artistic rendering characterized by their use of topographic surveys, textual fragments and found artifacts, his drawings and models construct complex narratives that connect the viewer to imaginative landscapes. I felt he is more like artist rather than architect. Since the field of architecture would be designing and constructing a building or a structure. I think, however, art and architecture actually are very similar because the truth is that architecture requires as much of aesthetics and designing sense as any piece of art.

He talked about his research that seems related to the concept of narrative architecture. I personally believe that in order to create the best projects we can, there must be an element of storytelling worked into and throughout the design process. In design process, narrative can be used to facilitate the exploration of ideas pertaining to architecture but also can also be condensed to generating more specific ideas.

Design Build

Hearing John and Greg talk about the past significance of design build in the school turned into a revealing look at the basis behind the teaching philosophies throughout the first few years of this school. While these years do not seem incomplete now, their mode of instruction makes a lot more sense given a context of design build. Greg's fascination with do-dads and tangible, expressive details become infinitely more relevant when students are actually faced with a project that requires them to build it. Ultimately, the conversation about the place of design build in the program highlights the struggle for direction that the school faces. While I have seen attempts recently to bring design build back into the program, I think that the way we think about it should be fundamentally different than the large-scale aspirations of its previous incarnation.

John made an interesting comment towards the end of presentation, about doing a digital design build. While I think his idea of digital to physical translation is much different than ours, it may point to a way that we can reintegrate design build with the digital at the forefront of the drive. In our own sense this is already happening, most of the digital classes end with the construction of a installation scale piece. I highly doubt that these pieces, or even the works by other schools is close to what John was talking about, but with the limitations of current computational tools, this is what is possible. At this point, the technology that we have allows us to experiment with form within a previously tested contraction system. It does not deal with designing digital details, or making something that needs to stand up semi-permanently, but I have no doubt that we will get there, and the result will look radically different than the design build of the past.

Design Build in the SOA

10-25-13

After hearing Greg and John talk about the history of design build in Storrs, it became apparent that the goal of design-build within the SOA was something that was no longer a major presence as it had once been.  The school had a strong relationship with studios emphasizing the design build process, but one thing that John mentioned was that with this type of program, there isn’t much design practice.  It’s difficult to have that balance when a class can only dedicate a few weeks to designing a house then have to spend the rest of the semester building it.  This balance was reached with the introduction of smaller projects such as pavilions that would allow for a more equal split of building to designing.  However, even this ended with the school saying no to new building projects by the SOA.  As a result, the design build projects became smaller and smaller.  However, these projects can still retain their significance by ensuring that students put the same amount of attention to detail into these projects. 

            The nature of design build at an inhabitable scale is changing rapidly.  Construction methods are evolving as well as the design methods that go with them.  As a profession, we’re moving towards a more hands off way of thinking and practicing.  Tools such as CNC machines and 3D printers are giving us the ability to create things quickly and easily from our chairs.  The next step for the school could be in the direction of marrying the digital design with the hand craft.  The combination of the two elements can yield an environment that is beneficial to both design approaches.

ZTP1987

10-18-13

            I’ve known Zac for a few years, but have never heard him actually explain his work before.  It’s fascinating the way that he takes layering and collage to a new exploratory level of phenomenological expression.  Zac sees architecture as a narrative process, and literally translates that from his sketches and concepts into exquisitely crafted artifacts that range from paintings and books to shadow boxes.  He seems to be interested in what’s hidden within something and performs various operations to pull out that idea.  These operations may be layering with text, paint, or paper to cover and uncover different meanings that Zac laid into his piece.  The examination of an objects idea or potential is the groundwork for his art, and is the same way that he believes architecture should address a site observation. 

            Zac’s research into John Hejduk reveals a similar exploration into how architects treat the site.  Hejduk’s masques offer an exploration into their various settings and seek to reveal something that was previously unnoticed about the site. 

            It is this type of investigation that cannot be left behind as we progress into the future.  The digital tools that we have at our disposal can separate us from this connection.  We have to look at keeping our connection to the site in our design repertoire otherwise the interventions that we produce will become more and more disconnected. 

Zac Porter

Technology presents a problem for the individual. When placed inside a system, they become just another cog in the system. Their interpretation of the environment does not matter when systematic analysis drives design. The individual becomes the righteous hero, fighting for their individual liberties. With the imagery this rage against the machine brings, garnering support for this heroic view is not hard.

At the core, Zac seems to encourage above all else, the subjectivity of analysis. The point gets muddled somewhere between the landscape, and anti-technology arguments, but it is not an unreasonable position to take. Of course everyone experiences architecture and landscape differently. He takes the position, however, from such a distant point, that architectural interventions become impossible. Taking his view, the architect has no right, or no way, to interpret the environment successfully, as only the individual can truly see [the subjective] meaning.

To respond, I don’t think we should ignore the individual experience in space. The position Zac takes is not wholly unreasonable. But that should not stop us from taking a systematic (technologic) approach to design. He may be trying to “swing the discourse back” towards individualism, but that seem preemptive when digital architecture is still in a relatively infantile stage. The individual may be de-emphasized, but they system does not have to do away with their interpretation.

The greatest paradox of Zac’s argument arose with his analysis of imagined landscapes. He used them as a basis for individual interpretation and non-systematic logic, but never acknowledged that the entire system was of his design. He made the landscape, he drew the grid, he drew the analysis graph, and he provided he labels for each significant point. From an artistic standpoint, this all fine, but the process is so insulated from any exterior forces, that it becomes impossible to say that the analysis proves anything. The only difference between a technologic system, and his imagined landscapes, is that the technologic system must choose to, or admit to, ignoring context. In his imagined landscapes they only conflicts that he had do deal with were imagined.

Individual-centric design is not bad, but from a development standpoint, it is not a productive position to take. We can not make any progress if we keep holding back.

Geodesign

The intro to geodesign was interesting for the fact that is exactly the thing architects’ hate, having to design based on a set of evidence. However, the study of the surrounding area, and integration of information in the design process is very prevalent in urban design and landscape architecture. In these fields, the product of the design process is not a singular piece of a larger designed system. Instead, the product is the system in which architecture sites, and as a system, it must respond to emergent properties of the area. This is why architecture can get away with not following evidence of its surroundings, because it responds to the larger “designed” landscape and can choose to integrate or reject it. On the contrary, an urban system cannot reject itself; only change the trajectory of the current system.

In the case of urban design and landscape architecture geodesign, and the tools that allow it to be integrated into the design process are extremely useful. The ability to study and design around existing and predicted growth means that designers can control, or influence, the 4^th dimension of design, time. It’s a quality that is readily visible to the two fields, but really only accessible to architects through the weathering of materials. While its possible to create form that is derived from a topological understanding of time, it is not yet possible to create buildings that respond to the passage of time. Barring a sudden, dramatic shift in our anthropological understanding of buildings, people will still walk the same way through the halls, they will enter through the door, and the way that people inhabit spaces will be the same. Urban spaces change, and that is the reason that evidence, or layers of information are extremely important to the design process, and I think geodesign, and its quest for better tools to integrate information into the process will eventually sway the opinion of architects who will find a good use for the vast amounts of information available about the city and the environment.

Ideas Seminar: Ming-Chun Lee

Ideas Seminar: Ming-Chun Lee

Date: September, 27, 2013

Professor Ming-Chun Lee has been working the digital technologies in urban design, planning processes and integrating computers into every aspect of urban design and planning. He talked about GeoDesign, digital visualization, GIS, 3D graphic media in urban design. GeoDesign is an approach to city planning, land use and natural resource management that takes into geospatial modeling, impact simulations to facilitate urban design using geographic information system (GIS) data. GIS is collection of data for managing, visualizing and analyzing geographic information. GeoDesign brings GIS into the design process and allows initial design sketches to be investigated for suitability against a lot of database layers describing a variety of physical and social factors of our real world for the spatial extent of the project.

GeoDesign enables designers to think about data as part of a creative decision-making process and to translate geospatial analysis into urban design. Through design thinking, coupled with GIS analysis and digital programming, we can make urban scenarios as much we want. Data mapping helps us assess the consequences of different scenarios. I can understand the analysis of physical planning issues and problems, and how to use digital technologies in urban design processes, and the creation of design solutions during his lecture. I think the advantage of the digital approach to GeoDesign, GIS is an effective tool for analyzing complex spatial relationships within urban environments and further refining their design solutions based on knowledge learned from spatial analysis processes. In addition, designers can explore ways to better integrate GIS with other digital visualization programs for effective presentations and communications. Similar tools will save a lot of time spent in the debugging process and increase efficiency.

Ideas Lab

Thomas Gentry approached one of the biggest problems of anyone we have talked to so far. The goal of making buildings more sustainable has been a research goal for a while now, with each researcher taking a different approach to the problem. For Thomas, this meant breaking the problem down into three different focus areas, economic, cultural, and technological. While this doesn’t make the problem any smaller, it allows Thomas to orient his research to one of those areas, and make it much less abstract than just the overall goal of green architecture. With each individual project that the IDEAS lab pursues he can hack away at a small part of the problem with the ultimate goal of contributing to a greater solution. The only disadvantage to this approach is that it makes any summation of the individual projects seem disjointed.

I appreciated that his approach focuses on solving small attainable problems, such a low income housing as an alternative to the unified “fix all our problems” theories that architectural research usually seems to pursue. Unlike most design problems that typically revolve around the better way to make spaces the research of the IDEAs lab is measurable, quantifiable, and can thus be optimized. With each project Thomas focuses on optimizing the problem just a little bit, to get people to pay closer attention to how much energy they are using, or reducing the potential energy usage by spending a little bit more on appliances. It’s all much easier to swallow then the usual hand waving that goes along with solar, wind, geothermal solutions.

Ideas Seminar: Thomas Gentry

Date: September 13, 2013

Thomas Gentry is a Professor in the School of Architecture and Director of the Laboratory for Innovative Housing, a multidisciplinary research laboratory operating within the IDEAS (Infrastructure Design Environment and Sustainability) Center. He briefly explained about IDEAS Center projects ranging from complex infrastructure systems and residential housing developments, to innovative material design and ecosystem impact studies.

He presented how sustainability issues can be addressed more comprehensively and how a similar common understanding of social sustainability. Economic, environmental and social are interrelated. Economic vitality relies on the integrity of healthy ecosystems, which hold the Earth’s resources. Likewise, economic and social well-being is linked, as illustrated through the recent recession. Environmental and social well-being are similarly connected, as seen in cases when people who live in poverty and are socially marginalized end up living in places with environmental issues that are caused by people who are more affluent and less socially marginal. Despite its critical connections to the other two pillars, social sustainability is the least understood and defined. Broadly speaking, social sustainability looks at relationships, interactions and institutions that affect and are affected by sustainable development. People often hold a wide variety of perspectives on what social sustainability is and how it can be discussed, implemented and assessed.

The IDEAS Center has established with several other entities, including representatives from civil, mechanical, electrical and systems engineering; architecture, biology, business, chemistry, geography and earth science, psychology, public health, and sociology. Especially Professor focuses on building code I think, this unique and highly collaborative environment research is important, because the team would include all the disciplines and stakeholders relevant to the project. These people would approach the work with an attitude of optimism and excitement to contribute their skills, perspectives, resources and knowledge to the group.

Stable, Sustainable Building. Thomas Gentry

9-13-13

Thomas Gentry has been working with the IDEAS Center at UNCC developing a method to help architects and engineers design structures in a more energy efficient and conservation minded manner.  They are basing their research off of a three-pronged approach to sustainable design through equal focus on the economic, cultural, and environmental factors that the building project influences.  By taking these three ideas and focusing our attention on how architecture affects each one, we can determine areas in which to change our design processes and improve the sustainability of our buildings in all three areas. 

Implementation of this process begins with pedagogy, in both the professional and academic environments.  Here is where the challenge lies.  Teaching students these methods is far simpler than teaching professionals already set in their ways.  In order to combat this setback, Professor Gentry and his team are looking to implement changes into building codes to implement the various methods that they have designed.  By changing the codes, the professional dimension of architecture would have to change across the board and in a way that would start to implement the change a lot faster than if we were to wait for the next generation or two of freshly graduated architecture students.

                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                                             

Visual.ly - Drew Skau

In our talk with Drew the one thing that struck me the most was his description of the visualization tool that he was working on. While I expected a more ambiguous answer, he definitively said that it was designed for someone with knowledge about the meaning of the data. While at first this statement seems like a clear focus on one particular user group, I think there a few things going on in this statement. As a tool focused on scientists that have domain knowledge it can either be a flexible presentation tool, or an exploratory visualization tool like Tableau. While the difference between softwares is not a black and white distinction, Drew’s tool doesn’t not seem to be exploratory. Instead of interacting directly with the data, the user applies visual filters to a dataset data. Thus, it seems that Drew’s software is focused on consolidating the workflow between scientist and visualization, where the scientist can make their own visualizations instead of relying on a designer to construct the visualization.

On the other hand Bret Victor’s software seems clearly focused on the designer and not the researcher. While it may seem to occupy the same space as Drew’s software it allows for much more manipulation of the visualizations that is probably outside the scope of knowledge of a researcher. Take his flexible grid example, where the entire grid is based off of the dimensions of a rectangular primitive. Researchers may be able to take advantage of this, but the thing that is more important to them is control of the scale of each side of the graph. If it were truly focused on visualization production from the research perspective the grid would be constructed from two variables that each define the scale of the x and y coordinates.

Both Bret and Drew approach the challenge of constructing visualizations but come as the problem from opposite ends of the problem. Drew focuses on the production of visualizations from the perspective of the researcher and Bret focuses on the ability to create flexible, parametric visualizations without a specific user in mind.

Ideas Seminar: Drew Skau

Date: September 13, 2013

Dr. Drew Skau focuses on real-time visualizations and digital media. And also he interested in new digital fabrication methods. I think, his research is primarily concerned with my research. I’m studying with Prof. Mary Lou Maher recently on Envision Charlotte. The uptown community can see data about collective real-time data on energy usage via digital displays throughout the center city. This allows businesses and individuals to keep track of their energy usage and to conveniently see how much power they are consuming or saving via social media alerts. They expected that with broader energy consumption awareness, all will be empowered to make better personal energy saving decision which will collectively add up towards the 20% reduction goal for the community. Unfortunately, it did not going well, no one used this digital display. In this sense, we focus on creating interactive display models about sustainable issues to communicate with people and to change or evaluate human sustainability behavior for energy savings. In order to encourage people’s participation, we’ve been looking for useful example of infographic and visualization.  

I think, Infographic and visualizations are more powerful and effective way to literally catch people’s way. With the constant hustle and bussle of modern life, people have short attention spans. And it is no wonder people experience information overload. With smartphones, tablets and the ubiquity of the internet, people are constantly receiving, analyzing, sharing and creating new information. Due to this overload we need to stick out to get people’s attention. Creating a compelling visualization of data or information can make it really stick out from all of the other noise of day-to-day life. Moreover, by creating something that is visually compelling, people are more likely to be engaged and creating visualizations can make complex information easier to understand. In this sense, I thought the examples and website he provides make me more convincing and interesting.